Friend of the blog and past contributor, Wichi, weighs in on his new least favorite television show(s):

In the midst of the killing season, i.e., bashing our least favorite candidate for the Office of the President, permit me a brief cease-fire from the festivities to draw our collective eye to what I believe is a real and insidious virus in the American corpus, reality television. This ubiquitous form of programming has become a way of celebrating, if not worshiping, the worst characteristics [crass, dumb, insipid, loud, petty, stupid, violent, and vulgar, to name a few] of our fellow citizens.

In terms of how we think of our place in society, the sub-culture exposed by the popularity of reality shows, is scary enough to force me into rethinking my allegiances. Requiring a new cultural fantasy draft, if you will. For our draft preparation, let’s begin by determining, who is NOT the enemy?

It is not Mr. Obama, although I cannot wait to cast at least one, and if I move to the right district of Miami, several votes for Romney. While left-leaning and, in my opinion, a new age version of Jimmy Carter (never a compliment to compare anyone to Carter), he is a law abiding, smart, learned man; it is NOT Mr. Romney, whom his political opponents believe to be a rich, out of touch (isn’t getting out of touch the GOAL of making money?), flip-flopping, corporate stool pigeon.

I’ve come to the realization that the enemy is not the far right, or far left, or disgraced politicians, or spineless ones. Regardless of brains or motivation, I have always believed than most on the national stage mean well for America. Maybe its just THEIR America, but dammit, a nice chunk of America nevertheless.

The Enemy, my good people, for lack of a better sub-grouping, are the audience for reality TV shows. I include in that group, people who watch to reaffirm their superiority over those they are watching. They are something worse than dumb, they are cruel.

Sometime in the middle of the technological night, as we and others debated Bush/Clinton/Kerry/McCain/Palin/Obama/Biden, et al, they, — as in millions and millions of our fellow American citizens — turned to Honey Boo Boo.

I submit that we, the anti-reality show part of society, do no good bashing the other smart guys “guy,” because, and this chills me more than ObamaCare and a Biden press conference — they are not the biggest problem we face. In reality [get it], our problem is maintaining a great society when a significant portion of that society is watching and enjoying their reality TV.